From this sketch of their rules concerning external relations, it becomes apparent that the Romans gave to the future the example of a State with _legal_ rules for its foreign relations. As the legal people _par excellence_, the Romans could not leave their international relations without legal treatment. And though this legal treatment can in no way be compared to modern International Law, yet it constitutes a contribution to the Law of Nations of the future, in so far as its example furnished many arguments to those to whose efforts we owe the very existence of our modern Law of Nations.
[Sidenote: No need for a Law of Nations during the Middle Ages.]
§ 41. The Roman Empire gradually absorbed nearly the whole civilised ancient world, so far as it was known to the Romans. They hardly knew of any independent civilised States outside the borders of their empire. There was, therefore, neither room nor need for an International Law as long as this empire existed. It is true that at the borders of this world-empire there were always wars, but these wars gave opportunity for the practice of a few rules and usages only. And matters did not change when under Constantine the Great (313-337) the Christian faith became the religion of the empire and Byzantium its capital instead of Rome, and, further, when in 395 the Roman Empire was divided into the Eastern and the Western Empire. This Western Empire disappeared in 476, when Romulus Augustus, the last emperor, was deposed by Odoacer, the leader of the Germanic soldiers, who made himself ruler in Italy. The land of the extinct Western Roman Empire came into the hands of different peoples, chiefly of Germanic extraction. In Gallia the kingdom of the Franks springs up in 486 under Chlodovech the Merovingian. In Italy, the kingdom of the Ostrogoths under Theoderich the Great, who defeated Odoacer, rises in 493. In Spain the kingdom of the Visigoths appears in 507. The Vandals had, as early as in 429, erected a kingdom in Africa, with Carthage as its capital. The Saxons had already gained a footing in Britannia in 449.
All these peoples were barbarians in the strict sense of the term. Although they had adopted Christianity, it took hundreds of years to raise them to the standard of a more advanced civilisation. And, likewise, hundreds of years passed before different nations came to light out of the amalgamation of the various peoples that had conquered the old Roman Empire with the residuum of the population of that empire. It was in the eighth century that matters became more settled. Charlemagne built up his vast Frankish Empire, and was, in 800, crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III. Again the whole world seemed to be one empire, headed by the Emperor as its temporal, and by the Pope as its spiritual, master, and for an International Law there was therefore no room and no need. But the Frankish Empire did not last long. According to the Treaty of Verdun, it was, in 843, divided into three parts, and with that division the process of development set in, which led gradually to the rise of the several States of Europe.